A well-aligned AI will use its superpowers to save humanity by curing diseases and solving our most pressing problems; an unaligned AI could decide to wipe out all humans through any one of a number of means, or simply kill or enslave everyone as a by-product of its own obscure goals. Since we don’t even know how to build a superintelligence, figuring out how to align one before it is made is an immense challenge. AI alignment researchers, using a combination of logic, mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and improvisation are trying to figure out approaches to this problem.
